Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Thursday At Daytona: It's Just Practice!

There is a very different kind of schedule at Daytona, so both the Nationwide and Sprint Cup Series will be on the track Thursday, but only for practice.

There will be no TV for the early Nationwide Series practice at 2:30PM Eastern Time. There are no additional details available to us about which network owns the TV rights or why this session is not being televised.

Next-up at 4PM will be the first Sprint Cup Series practice session on SPEED. Steve Byrnes will host the coverage with Jeff Hammond and Larry McReynolds alongside. Patrolling the garage as reporters will be Lindsay Czarniak and Ralph Shaheen.

At 5:30PM it will be the final practice for the Nationwide gang and this session will be carried live on ESPN2. Dr. Jerry Punch, Dale Jarrett and Andy Petree will be in the announce booth with Mike Massaro, Jamie Little, Shannon Spake and Dave Burns covering the garage and pits. There will be no early edition of NASCAR Now because of this coverage, it will air at Midnight Eastern/9PM Pacific Time.

Back we go to SPEED at 6:30PM for the final Cup practice. Byrnes, Hammond and McReynolds will this time be joined from the garage by Matt Yocum and Marty Snider.

Just a reminder, the Rolex Sports Cars take to the road-course in Daytona for a three hour race beginning live on SPEED at 8PM. It should be fun to watch the culture clash between the NASCAR fans and the sports car bunch, but most of all the noise will make for some grumpy Sprint Cup drivers on Friday morning.

ESPN2 covers Friday Nationwide qualifying at 1PM, SPEED takes Sprint Cup qualifying at 4PM and the Nationwide race hits the air with a special one hour NASCAR Countdown show at 7PM. Trackside airs on SPEED at 11PM.

This post will serve to host your comments about the Thursday action on NASCAR's TV partners. To add your TV-related comment, just click on the COMMENTS button below and follow the easy directions. The rules for posting are located on the right side of the main page. Thanks for taking the time to stop by The Daly Planet.

19 comments:

Wow so no Nationwide early practice- sounds like the espn of last season. Not a good sign of things to come. And with the way the weather has been here, early is probably the 1 practice that will be run.

hey jd? as a philly-based fan, i must admit that any column banner that includes iverson makes me grit my teeth!

that being said: so we don't get the first n'wide practice but we do get the second and both cup practices (should any of these actually occur.) "There are no additional details available to us about which network owns the TV rights or why this session is not being televised." i'd certainly like to know who made the decision to bag that first n'wide practice, just as a point of information to tuck away. i usually try to catch the practices as much as i can b/c it's really a good look at the track, the lines, the way cars are handling and being adjusted. daytona adds the drafting aspect as well. but i'm not gonna whimper this time around. while i don't understand why whoever it is who is involved (see above!) isn't opting to broadcast the early session, i guess i'll just accept that espn will at least be picking up the second one. oh well.

Same old same old from last year. If ESPN is in town they cover Happy Hour only and Speed isn't allowed to televise the other practice sessions for that series in ESPN's absence, so they are left untelevised.

It surely can't be a coincidence that ESPN and Speed aren't splitting coverage for a particular series since this happens over and over and over and over again.

ESPN has done well to fix their on-air problems for the Nationwide Series races this year and hopefully they don't go back to their old habits like Musburger, full-screen race recaps, and Sportscenter Minutes during the Cup races. I am just completely stunned that their ridiculous approach to covering practice and qualifying has been carried over from last year.

ESPN, please take the TNT approach and leave practice and qualifying to Speed Channel. Your half-hearted "dipping one toe into the water" approach to only allowing limited sessions to be televised during your portion of the Cup schedule is doing a terrible disservice to the NASCAR fans that are used to having every session televised from Daytona in February through Chicago in July.

If your family of networks are incapable of providing live coverage of every Cup practice and qualifying session on a weekend then stay the hell away until race day like TNT does.

Tape-delayed Happy Hours late on Saturday nights and TV blackouts of morning practice sessions are completely unacceptable in 2008. This isn't 1998 any more, where fans were lucky and thankful to have any TV coverage at all of qualifying and a single practice session since ESPN was the only network providing that type of coverage back then.

Unfortunately ESPN it is now 2008. Now all of your competitors provide live coverage of Cup qualifying and every Cup practice session EVERY SINGLE WEEK (except for what, 3 practices this year when Speed had scheduling conflicts?). Your 1998 model of the acceptable level of NASCAR TV coverage on a weekend is terribly outdated and it is a joke that you think this approach is somehow just going to be accepted by today's fans because we should somehow feel so blessed that these sessions are on ESPN2, and that blessing should somehow more than make up for the side effects of having no coverage at all of morning practice sessions and Happy Hour usually being tape-delayed.

Cover the races and stay the hell away from everything else, no one will think anything less of you and we will all in fact thank you for doing the right thing for the fans.

Like I said, no clue about this one. TV stuff is there, cars are on track and ESPN2 has the time.

JD

hmmm. curiouser and curiouser. wonder what's behind it all then if all the reasons i sorta thought might be the cause have been accounted for?

anyone from our broadcast friends willing to weigh in anonymously on this one? inquiring fans wants to know. i'm willing to assume some benign explanation but in the absence of ANY explanation, i'm left to wonder.

(see, this is exactly what leads to fans making outrageous claims which no doubt piss off the broadcasters. but if you choose to remain mute on the reasons, the void will be filled, however irrational the explanation. as someone far wiser than me has pointed out, "perception is reality.")

I just figured out why no one carried early practice!Both TNT & Speed are showing the Lenox301!!!Wow and both replays are listed as "NEW" so my recorder turned on- they make more money & news re airing the Cup races. And espn2 is re airing First take then NBA access, then High school BB and a couple 1/2 hr shows. Thanks for nothing.

Red, I agree on the Iverson at first I thought I was on the wrong site. (I actually grew up in Philly). I can understand it if there is something else worthwhile on including the replay of the cup race on Speed because they always do it but what about ESPN2. I guess NW practice is not as necessary is some people's eye's but if they are doing drafting practice anything can happen.

anonymous said...Satellite time is expensive. An early nationwide practices doesn't have enough viewers to get advertisers to even pay the costs associated with a live production.

ok, so that's an explanation right there. not necessarily a great one in my mind b/c ya' know what? doing business, any business, has costs and sometimes a business takes a loss leader in order to build and maintain consumer loyalty.

but, ok, i have an explanation. which leads to another question: so the late practice gets enough fans to make the costs acceptable? or is it the combination of late n'wide sandwiched in between 2 cup sessions? i'm not trying to be obnoxious; i'm trying to understand the forces that drove the decision.

and a second question for you media types among us: does a thursday rerun of a previous race get better viewship than a live practice session at daytona? again, i'm looking to understand, not be combative here.

bowlalpo said... Since it's "just practice" is it possible that ESPN just can't get companies to buy ads for the time slots?

Does ESPN show NBA shootarounds or MLB batting practice? I know it's not the same and I like watching practice, especially RP races, but all three cases are "just practice."

July 3, 2008 2:47 PM

My thought on it is - if they won't / can't air it they should not bid on it or include it in the package they buy rights to. This isn't stick & ball. They have aired other practices - so whats the deal here?And espn can sell ads for replays of events, non events and whatever else they want to sell ads to. For those of you younger fans espn in its early days sold ads on Aussie rules football & they are the network that first aired the spelling bee as a sports event.

This does not surprise anyone who lives here. Except whoever makes the NA$CAR schedule. Supposed to sprinkle on & off for a while, this is normal around Florida this time of year. We call it sunshowers